Chinese Whispers

III

The sun sneaked and glanced and angled its way off windows in high rise apartments and office blocks as it lifted off the eastern horizon and beamed directly along the east-west boulevards of the Beijing grid system. As it rose, it coloured the sky blue. A painfully clear sky, free from pollution or mist, dipping to pale orange and yellow along its eastern fringe. A silvery sliver of moon was caught falling in the west behind the purple-hued mountains Li’s breath billowed and wreathed around his head as he pedalled slowly north, weaving through the traffic along Chaoyangmen Nanxiao Da Jie.

Everywhere the building work went on, rising up behind green-clad scaffolding from the rubble of the old city. Cranes stalked the skies overhead, the roar of diggers and pneumatic drills already filling the early morning air. Most of the street stalls he had cycled past for years were gone; the hawkers peddling hot buns and sweet potatoes from sparking braziers, the old lady feeding taxi drivers from her big tureen of soup, the jian bing sellers. New pavements had been laid, new trees planted. And all along Dongzhimen, east of Section One, new apartment blocks lined the street where just a year before squads of men equipped only with hammers had begun knocking down the walls of the old siheyuan courtyards which had characterised Beijing for centuries. It was cleaner, fresher, and there was no doubt that life for ordinary Beijingers was improving faster than it had done in five thousand years. But, still, Li missed the old city. He was unsettled by change.

So it was comforting for him to know that Mei Yuan was still at the corner of Dongzhimen where she had sold jian bing from her bicycle stall for years. During the demolition and construction work she had been forced to move to the opposite corner of the Dongzhimen-Chaoyangmen intersection. And then she had faced opposition to her return from the owners of a new restaurant built on her old corner. It was a lavish affair, with large picture windows and red-tiled canopies sweeping out over the sidewalk, brand-new red lanterns dancing in the breeze. Street hawkers, they told her, had no place here now. Besides, she was putting off their customers. She would have to find somewhere else to sell her peasant pancakes. Li had paid them a quiet visit. Over a beer, which the owner had been only too anxious to serve him, Li had pointed out that Mei Yuan had a licence to sell jian bing wherever she wanted. And since the officers of Section One of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Beijing Municipal Police, just across the road, liked to get their jian bing from Mei Yuan — on that particular corner — the restaurant might like to reconsider its attitude to the jian bing seller. It did.

Li saw steam rising from the tin-roofed glass cover that sat over the hotplate and the pancake mix and bowls of sauces and spices that surrounded it. An elderly couple were paying Mei Yuan for their pancakes as Li cycled up and leaned his bicycle against the wall of the restaurant. He watched them bite hungrily into their hot savoury packages as they headed off along Ghost Street, where thousands of lanterns swayed among the trees and the city’s new generation of rich kids would have spent the night eating and drinking in restaurants and cafés until just a few hours ago. Mei Yuan turned a round, red face in his direction and grinned. ‘Have you eaten?’ she asked. The traditional Beijing greeting.

‘Yes, I have eaten,’ he replied. The traditional response. If you had eaten and were not hungry, then all was well.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘A jian bing?’

‘Of course.’

She poured creamy mix on to the hotplate and scraped it round into a perfect pancake. ‘You’re early this morning.’

‘A call-out.’

She detected something in his voice and threw him a quick glance. But she said nothing. She knew that if he wanted to talk about it he would. She broke an egg and smeared it over the pancake, sprinkling it with seeds before flipping it over to paint it with savoury and spicy sauces. Her fingers were red raw with the cold.

Li watched her as she worked; hair tucked up in a bun beneath her white cap, quilted blue jacket over jogpants, sweatshirt and trainers. Her white cotton coat hung open, several sizes too small. She made a poor living from her pancakes, augmented only by the money Li and Margaret paid her to baby-sit for Li Jon. Both Li and Mei Yuan had lost people close to them during the Cultural Revolution. He, his mother. She, her son. Now one was a surrogate for the other. There wasn’t anything Li wouldn’t have done for the old lady. Or she for him.

Her demeanour never changed. Her smooth round face was remarkably unlined, crinkling only when she smiled, which was often. Whatever misery she had suffered in her life she kept to herself. And there had been plenty. Wrenched from a university education and forced to work like a peasant in the fields. A baby lost. A husband long gone.

‘What are you reading?’ he asked, and he pulled out the book she had tucked down behind her saddle.

‘A wonderful story,’ she said. ‘A triumph of humanity over ignorance.’

‘To Kill A Mockingbird,’ he read from the title in English.

‘The writer is completely inside the little girl’s head,’ Mei Yuan said, and Li could see from her face that she was transported to some place on the other side of the world she would never see. Her escape from a life that offered little else. ‘She must have been in that place herself, to write it like that.’

She put a square of deep-fried whipped eggwhite on top of the pancake, broke it in four and deftly folded it into a brown paper bag which she handed to Li. He dropped some notes in her tin and took a bite. It tasted wonderful. Spicy, savoury, hot. He could not imagine a life that did not start each day with a jian bing. ‘I have a riddle for you,’ he said.

‘I hope it’s harder than the last one.’

He threw her a look. ‘Two coal miners,’ he said. ‘One is the father of the other’s son. How is this possible?’ She tossed her head back and laughed. A deliciously infectious laugh that had him smiling too, albeit ruefully. ‘What?’ he said. ‘What?’ A group of passing cyclists turned to stare at them, wondering what was so amusing.

‘You’re not serious?’

‘Is it really so easy? I mean, I spent ages trying to work out if maybe one was the father, and the other the stepfather …’

‘Oh, Li Yan, you didn’t!’ Her smile was full of mock pity. ‘It’s obvious that they’re husband and wife.’

‘Well, yes it is,’ Li said. ‘I just didn’t see it immediately, that’s all.’ He had found a website on the internet which specialised in riddles. But none of them were in the same class as the ones Mei Yuan dreamed up for him.

‘I have one for you,’ she said.

‘I thought you might.’ He wolfed down another mouthful of steaming pancake and waited in trepidation.

She watched him chewing for a moment, reflecting on the problem she was about to set him. ‘Two deaf mutes are planting rice in a paddy field, far from their village in Hunan Province,’ she said. ‘It takes them an hour to make their way from one end of the paddy to the other. They have just finished lunch. One has the food, the other the drink. By sign language, they agree to meet again and share their food and drink when they have finished planting the field. They each have to plant another ten rows. When he has finished his work, the man with the food can’t see his friend anywhere, he waits for a while, and then, thinking his friend has gone back to the village, he eats the food himself. The next morning, he wakes up to find the other man shaking him, signing furiously, and accusing him of abandoning him and keeping his food to himself. But the man with the food says he only ate it because the other one went off with the drink and abandoned him. The man with the drink insists he was there all along! They are both telling the truth. How can this be?’

Li groaned. ‘Mei Yuan, I give you two lines. You give me a novel. Too much detail.’

‘Ah,’ Mei Yuan grinned. ‘It is in the detail that you will find the devil.’

Li waved his hand dismissively. ‘I’m not even going to think about it right now.’

‘You have more important things to think about?’

His face darkened, as if a cloud had cast its shadow on him. He closed his eyes, and still the image of the girl was there. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I have.’

And she knew she had crossed a line into dangerous territory. She made light of it. ‘Maybe by tonight you will have had time to think.’

‘Tonight?’ Li frowned.

‘Before you go to the Great Hall of the People. I have never been in the Great Hall of the People. If I were not baby-sitting, I would have gone to see you there myself.’

‘The Great Hall of the People,’ Li muttered. He had forgotten that it was tonight. How could he have forgotten? He would, after all, be centre stage. He cringed again with embarrassment at the thought of it. The Public Security Ministry was anxious to improve the image of the police, and with increasing coverage of crime by the media, Li had become one of the most high profile senior officers in the public eye. He was still young — under forty — tall, powerfully built and, if not exactly handsome, then striking in his looks. He had been considered perfect for the propaganda posters. And some PR person in the Minister’s office had dreamed up the idea of a People’s Award for Crime Fighting, to be presented in the full glare of publicity at the Great Hall of the People. Li’s objections had been dismissed out of hand. Summoned to the office of the city’s Police Commissioner, it had been made clear to him that this was not a matter in which he had any choice. When news of it leaked out, it had led to some good-humoured mickey-taking by some of his junior officers at Section One. But he had also become aware of jealousy among more senior officers at police headquarters downtown where he knew he had enemies. His spirits dipped.

‘I have other riddles to solve today, Mei Yuan. Why don’t you try yours on Margaret?’

‘Hah!’ Mei Yuan grunted. ‘She is always too quick. She is smarter than you.’

Li tossed his paper wrapping in the bin. ‘Thanks for the vote of confidence.’ He mounted his bike.

‘You are welcome. Maybe I will ask her, when I see her at the park.’

Li wheeled down off the sidewalk on to the road. ‘She won’t be there for tai chi today, Mei Yuan. She has to go to the visa office to get her extension application in.’

‘She still has to do that?’ Mei Yuan raised an eyebrow. ‘Don’t you have any influence?’

Li snorted. ‘You know the authorities frown on our relationship, Mei Yuan. Pin-up policeman living in sin with foreign devil. Doesn’t exactly fit the image of the poster campaign It’s only tolerated because everyone pretends it doesn’t exist. Besides, the Entry-Exit Police are a law unto themselves.’ He pushed off into the road to the accompaniment of a symphony of horns and called back over his shoulder, ‘See you tonight.’